Although Courier was never an official Microsoft
product, the design and concept behind the dual-screen hinged tablet garnered a
lot of enthusiasm. (Note: Sonyis
expected to launcha tablet with a similar form factor in the near future.)

Pioneer Studios' Seattle office closed a year
after J Allard, a former top designer at Microsoft credited with founding
Pioneer, left the company. Pioneer cofounder, George Petschnigg, is now listed
as an "entrepreneur" working on an "undisclosed new venture"
on his LinkedIn profile. He was instrumental in securing $20 million in
development funding for the now dead Courier. According to a PC World, he is now at Microsoft's
Startup Business Group.

Other Pioneer Studios employees have also
reportedly left the company or have joined other groups, notably the Startup
Business Group.

In addition to Pioneer, Microsoft has a number of
other incubation groups, including FUSE Labs, the Garage, and the Hardware
Incubation Lab.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

The problem is Balmer. He's the perfect person to maximize the amount of money that can be earned with MS's legacy products as they slowly fade into the sunset over the next decade or three. He's also incapable of looking more than a few months into the future and has systematically squashed anything new that might supplant a legacy platform with something that won't collapse as phones/tablets take over more of the PC space. Likewise he's stomped all over various R&D groups because their quarterly profit numbers are bad.

To turn the company around MS first and foremost needs to sack him; the problem is that he's already sacked all the other people who could be credible internal successors.

No kidding. The amount that Microsoft spends in R&D is astronomical. That they have so few shipping products outside of operating systems and office software, with an even lower number of successful ones, to show for it is bizarre. It is a vision problem and it comes from the top.

What? You must be kidding, MS has so many products and services that they will be around for generations. They make the fricking software that makes ALL other software for crying out loud (Visual Studio). Seriously we could make a list of 100 very successful products that make them boatloads of money. I mean, MS owns the business world hands down - and that's where the REAL money is at. Calm down folks, MS isn't going anywhere.

And I could go on and on and on. Not to mention all of the software and products that go alongside all of the above. They are everywhere.

The Courier was a cool concept but that's about all that it was. It would have been impossible to power both screens on battery life for more than a few hours, they would have had to build an entire OS just for this one product, the hardware to run both of these screens wasn't mature enough at the time (and still may not be), and the cost of the dual screens would have raised the price well above acceptable cost levels.

Are you high? Since when IIS is a fuckin standalone product? Or ASP.NET? These are supporting technologies, pretty much only introduced to make sure they will not use existing open source products (classic scumbag MS approach.)

MS has almost NOTHING to show for its R&D budget - you listed exactly what he said: beyond OS and Office there's barely anything to show. FYI Xbox is not even marketed like Microsoft but as Xbox - they know very well their name is tainted...

It IS Ballmer, this bald, dumb, arrogant fat prick - his utterly clueless about anything beyond using a mouse, a classic stupid bean-counter, nothing else.

You are spot-on about Balmer. He should have been fired long ago. It's hard to imagine Gates sitting around watching Balmer dismantle one of the great business success stories. MS has lots of smart people but Balmer wastes their talent and ignores their counsel. He is seen as a bad joke. It is really almost too hard to watch MS suffer under his total misdirection of MS resources and talent. And you're right that he is sucking every last dollar out of the legacy products; in fact, that is his only focus.

Balmer is just a symptom, MS is now a bureaucracy and this is something that happens all to often in a top heavy organization.

Here is what happens...

1. Employee will come up with great idea for new product.

2. R&D will develop product and test to a beta level.

3. R&D goes to management and says "Look at this, we could possibly sell a million of these! This is the future!"

4. Management says NO because there is no guarantee that they will sell a million and they don't want to be held accountable for a product failure.....

5. 2 to 5 years later the competition comes out with the exact same product and sells billions of them.

The bureaucracy is the problem. To many people in the food chain that don't want to risk their job by authorizing some project that may fail, since everybody will point the finger at them. Smaller companies will take the risk, also companies like Apple with someone like Steve Jobs at the helm will take the risk because Steve says they will.

Now that Bill Gates is not there to tell people on a daily basis to approve, push projects through and micro-manage, MS is and will be lost to mid level management that basically phones it in and will never take chances.

The only company that I have seen that avoids this is 3M. They encourage risk taking on new products and R&D as part of their corporate culture.

Right off the bat you got it wrong. Low level employees aren't the ones paid to "come up" with ideas. Those ideas come from the top down, employees are the ones who's job is to make the idea a real and tangible product. All organizations are "top heavy" in this regard.

quote: 3. R&D goes to management and says "Look at this, we could possibly sell a million of these! This is the future!"

You mean like they did with the Zune?

quote: 4. Management says NO because there is no guarantee that they will sell a million and they don't want to be held accountable for a product failure.....

You mean like, again, they did with the Zune? There sure as hell was no guarantee it would make millions competing against the iPod. And even after years of the Zune line getting it's ass handed to it, it's still out there.

Lack of basic business understanding, and it getting rated to a 5, is nothing new here, however. Carry on.

quote: Right off the bat you got it wrong. Low level employees aren't the ones paid to "come up" with ideas. Those ideas come from the top down, employees are the ones who's job is to make the idea a real and tangible product. All organizations are "top heavy" in this regard.

RC77, normally I would agree with you but in this case I my job takes me into some of the largest companies in the country. Many have dedicated R&D facilities that are there to come up with ideas.

For instance a 6 years ago a company I go to quite often came up a new type of medical scanner, took it all the way to a working unit and then went to upper management to get approval, and was shot down.....

Now company sales are way down due to the fact that one of their smaller rivals are cleaning their clocks with the exact same technology that they said would never make it years ago. They didn't even think it was worth filing patents on.

Management at the time said that the current medical scanning technology would dominate for the foreseeable future and they did not want to put the infrastructure in for a new line.....

I also know of other wonderful screwups by large companies for the same reasons, to risky, to expensive. A startup comes along and takes the risk with venture capital and away they go.

I think your number 1, that "Low level employees aren't the ones paid to "come up" with ideas" is dead wrong in any good organization. In a well run company, every employee is paid to make the company better -- and I've done both the three letter titles and the outside consulting to know it. As the OP stated, the problem is with the companies that don't take advantage of that, and Microsoft is a key example these days.

I don't know whether Courier should have gone ahead or not -- the cost concern was very real -- but the company shows every example of being a company that is too caught up in its management battles to be the success it should be. That's why Ballmer hasn't been able to move the stock price.

The simple fact is that Ballmer is a pretty good manager for a big business, definitely a good, maybe great COO. The enterprise expansions show that. What the company needs, though, is a new vision to pull the key pieces forward to the next decade, and that is just what Ballmer lacks.

Management says no because they look at a product, look at the costs associated with that product, and predict how many they will sell. There is a reason engineers don't run the company because sometimes things that are cool are not always things that are practical and/or make sense.

The Courier would not have sold well and would not have been a successful product. Dual screens would have killed battery life, killed performance, and sky rocketed the price way out of the e-reader/tablet market. It was a cool concept and I'm sure they learned a lot during R&D but it was not practical. It would not have performed well on the market and they would have ended up losing much more money then they already had.

Microsoft doesn't always kill new stuff. Take a look at Sync, Microsoft Surface, the Xbox, and the Zune before it was eventually killed off. These decisions are not phoned in. They are calculated business decisions and more often than not they are the right decisions. The Courier would have been a cool but extremely unsuccessful product.

quote: Microsoft doesn't always kill new stuff. Take a look at Sync, Microsoft Surface, the Xbox, and the Zune before it was eventually killed off.

All initiated before Gates relinquished full control, I think.

Also I can think of as many reasons why the Courier would have been a success as you could have for it to not be. Two screens and battery life? Since it is twice the tablet it can have twice the battery, and with software where the user selects how many screens are on when dealing with certain jobs, battery life could be much longer than the average tablet.

Killed performance? Again, since it has twice theoretically space, it could leverage 2 lower capacity processors that would give it better speed on the same power, or a whole host of things that could be done to increase performance...

Price? Well given the MS position in business nowdays that could have been leveraged to sell this at a higher price to companies that could use this. Sales people on customer sites that need to do quick presentations, delivery, inventory people who need quick data and lots of it displayed on a larger format than a regular tablet... Whole bunch of things that MS could have pushed it toward.

I would push this as a tablet for professionals, where as the Ipad is great for reading books, playing games and updating Facebook.